From the course: User Experience for Web Design

Simple design

From the course: User Experience for Web Design

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Simple design

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- The information that your visitors are looking for is going to be harder to find if it's surrounded by clutter. What I mean by this is that all elements of the page should be helping to tell the story, and if they don't, you should get rid of them. To your visitors, clutter is anything that gets between them and the content they want. The biggest offenders are out of context, decorative elements, intrusive adverts, and overly wordy chunks of text. Let's use some examples to illustrate what I mean. Site decorations. That is, images and graphics, should help set the scene for what the site is about. A lawn care site showing neatly-mown turf, for example, or a florist site showing flower arrangements, so that visitors can tell, at a glance, that they're in the right place. Images you use should help to explain your content. Stock photography of inane, happy, smiley people doesn't give visitors any clue as to what your site is about. Adverts should be relevant for things that readers are likely to care about. That includes content that's promoting your own products, as well as adverts you serve to generate revenue. Cutting the amount of text on the page helps you be more concise. In my experience, it's normally possible to cut it by 50% compared to what you might have in a print-based layout. We'll be talking about each of these elements in more detail later in the course, but for now, I want to be clear about something. Simple design doesn't mean boring. You can have decoration, you can have adverts, you can use graphics and interesting fonts. The one thing you have to remember is that all of these elements should be enhancing your content, rather than detracting from it. Simplifying is hard. As a site creator, you are probably the person responsible for putting those things in there in the first place. But be brave, think like your users and go through your site asking whether each element is helping or hindering your visitors.

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